Re: Interesting essay

[Robert Raschke <rtrlists@...>]

Sigh. There is no one true way!

Lua is absolutely brilliant for configuration scripting. (And quite a bit more, but you can run into difficulties quite quickly then.)

Programming languages are tools (note the plural!). In order to solve a large problem, you end up needing more than one tool. In all the industrial projects I have worked in, none of them used one programming language (compilers I worked on used assembly, C, Imp, Yacc, Lex; statistics programs used C, C++, Java, homegrown scripting language; IT mgmt program uses Java, Flash, _javascript_, Powerbuilder, SQL, Lua, Erlang, C, C++), plus build, test and support scripting (make, perl, python, ant, sh, awk, ...).

It's a toolbox, use as much of it as you need. But if all you know how to use is a screwdriver (aka Java, these days), you're gonna get into trouble reasonably quickly.

Further, writing a library for general use is very hard. Regardless of underlying language. Either you write a library that solves your problem, and if you make it public, quite a few people moan about lack of features. Or, at the other extreme, you invent CPAN. Not everyone has the resource to come up with something like the C++ template library, which is the only fully functioning, bells and whistles, stable, dependable and well documented bit of kit, I am aware of. Everything else (Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, Haskell, SML, C#, Lua, Squeak, Lisp, Fortran) is good to very good, but generally a bit of a mess all round.

Designing the supporting infrastructure for any programming language is a non-trivial task. Making the language is the easy part.

Robby

PS I never had the pleasure of working with Algol 60, which supposedly had a pretty good set of libraries at the time.